Run wild
I have spent the night with my sister, and in the morning, after she leaves for school, I find the little blue book on her window seat: Prayers for Difficult Times. I open at random: “Death of a Pet.”
The screen porch faces the rising sun, looks onto her garden. The door is unlatched. It is early October. It is Monday. I must get to work, too.
*
A voicemail transcription from last Thursday didn’t come through two until Saturday afternoon.
“This message is for Kirsten this is Officer Jackson with animal control um I have a cat named B______ that I believe might be yours I traced the microchip back to you um so if you could please give me a call back.”
*
I have to go back to the beginning. That far back. I am going.
E. and me and Mom. It is a summer morning. The calico kitten lies in a box of tissue paper. Mom doesn’t hurry us to bury it. No hurry. We can skip our swimming lesson, too.
We collect flowers and carry the kitten around in the box all day. I don’t remember burying her.
Years later Mom tells us our father cried after the kitten ran under the wheel as he slowly backed out, after he had checked carefully.
*
On Saturday morning we three are in a different garden, a garden I made. I said to this garden in the year I made it, in another hard time, “You are going to save my life.” This year I’ve let it run wild.
It is morning. It is Saturday. It is October and everything is wild.
On the other side of the world the hunter’s moon comes full. Everything goes wild.
*
Was it only last year?
I found half-grown yellow kitten. Sitting alone in the middle of the road, half a mile from any house. November, sunrise, a Friday. Not a fox, not a coyote. A kitten. Came straight to me, unafraid, warm.
I knocked on doors. No one claimed him. The dark-haired girl at the vet held him against her plaid shirt and looked at his teeth. “Four to five months.” Ran the scanner over him. “No chip. Want to keep him?”
*
I thought he would help E. since her old cat had died and harder things had happened. In her house the kitten ran wild, played catch and fetch, and when late summer came he was grown and went out, again and again, down the wild overgrown alley. He began to hunt in the warm autumn.
The moon was getting full.
*
Mom and E. have stopped on their way to the university vet clinic 90 minutes away, where they are taking the yellow cat’s body for an autopsy, so we can learn what happened.
They leave the highway and meet me at my garden, the garden that saved my life. We lay the yellow cat in the sun, in the open path. We could have some flowers, Mom says. I’m going to have him cremated, E. says. But there can be flowers, Mom says. We scatter zinnia petals and pale pink gomphrena. I stroke the body with marjoram, the teeth with Sweet Annie.
*
This morning, Monday, my heart tightens. Today I make my world small to survive: A book, a garden, a sunrise.
I wait on the porch to see the sun stroke the garden. The chair is faded floral, where I held the old gray cat a year ago, a month before I found the yellow kitten.
It was our birthday. E. and me.
*
Friday night to Sunday, E. stays with Mom. Sunday afternoon, E. sends a text. Can you come tonight?
I cook pasta, we watch a program about writing, how it changed everything.
While she sleeps I hear, for the first time in almost 30 years, the small sounds of the house itself. Children are grown and away, busy. No cats.
In the morning E. goes to her to school early. She has to watch kids in the gym before class. I wait by the dining room table in the stillness. I reach to raise the window shades. I find the little blue book.
*
Later I talk with the animal control officer, Officer Jackson. I go to the place where he found the yellow cat, lying, settled and still, and intact, by the concrete steps of the Masonic Lodge, next to the busy road.
I talk to the university veterinarian pathologist, a kind woman. A pelvic fracture, she said—from a car or a fall onto a hard surface—then internal bleeding.
The retreat to a sheltering corner. Settling and fainting.
Trees, moon.